For the past week or so, I’ve been watching the drama unfold as Kay Bailey Hutchison announced the transportation plank of her platform for governor and the ensuing television ad and Rick Perry’s counter-ad. The use of the DMS signs was clever, but her message shows a both continuing lack of understanding of the core issues on her part as well as a bit of a dichotomy.

In yesterday’s post, I took aim at the alleged “egregious fiscal malfeasance” that local toll-opponent Terri Hall accused ARMA of with regards to their plans for a US 281/Loop 1604 interchange. Today, I’ll take her to task on her claims of “unequal application of the law” with regards to the environmental studies required for the interchange versus those for 281 north of 1604.

This past Monday, the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority (ARMA) held a public meeting to show their plans for the US 281/Loop 1604 interchange. The interchange is being funded primarily with federal economic stimulus funds and therefore will be built toll-free, but that’s not enough for local outspoken toll-opponent Terri Hall. She had a lot to say about the project on her MySA.com blog yesterday. I submitted a response to it last night, but as she has to approve it, it hasn’t been posted yet. (But I’m not really surprised.) So I’m going to respond to her here on my turf. Because her comments went all over the map, I’m going to break this response up into two posts: one about the costs of the interchange (today), and one about the environmental clearance it is getting (tomorrow).

As reported here last week, the San Antonio-Bexar County Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) policy board was scheduled to vote on the “Mobility 2035” long-range regional plan yesterday. Toll opponents were angry because the plan included numerous projects in three corridors (I-35 North, Loop 1604, and I-10 West) pigeon-holed as toll-concession projects, also known as Comprehensive Development Agreement (CDA) projects. As I explained previously, because current projections show little to no gas-tax funds being available during the time span of the plan, those projects had to have creative funding “placeholders” assigned to them in order to continue planning work on them, those placeholders being CDAs.

During my daily review of transportation news, I came across this the-sky-is-falling press release by staunch toll-opponent Terri Hall and her TURF organization. As usual, TURF shows a continued lack of insight of what’s actually happening and peppers the article with their predictable array of tried-and-true rhetoric, fallacies, and mendacities as they denounce the large number of projects that are listed as possible toll and Comprehensive Development Agreement (CDA) projects in the new 25-year regional transportation plan. Yes, there are a substantial number of toll-option projects in the plan. However, the outright panic by TURF is premature and demonstrates their failure to see and comprehend the bigger picture and actually jeopardizes badly-needed future projects.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about “the man who gets it”, that man being state Senator John Carona of Dallas, who understands our current transportation funding crisis enough to risk political suicide by suggesting an increase in the state’s gas tax to fix it (the correct solution in my not-so-humble opinion.) Today, I’m going to write about the person who has shown once again to be deserving of the title of “the man who just doesn’t get it”: Tommy Adkisson, the current chairman of the San Antonio-Bexar County Metropolitan Planning Organization’s (MPO) policy board.

As you may recall, Adkisson was the official instigator of a vote in October to drop the toll option from the MPO’s plans regarding future US 281 and Loop 1604 projects. That proposal went down in flames when the MPO board voted 13-5 against it, mainly because it had no objective engineering study to support it, something even an amateur elected official would realize is essential to substantiate your case. Even the San Antonio Express-News editorial board labeled his actions “erratic and ill-considered”. I, however, was willing to let Tommy off the hook for this boondoggle since it was obvious that outspoken toll opponent Terri Hall was the real culprit pulling the strings behind the scenes and I believed he just didn’t understand what he was getting himself into. His declaration after the vote that he was done with toll road issues and wanted to move on to more substantive discussions, such as mass transit, also led me to believe that he was sincerely jaded on the whole 281 debacle.

(Note: Significant edits were made to this posting at about 5:25pm on 11/19/09. The edits consisted of polishing the wording; the gist of the information was not changed.)

Several recent letters to the editor in the San Antonio Express-News have presented what their writers obviously consider to be an epiphany to solving the problems on US 281 North: just build some overpasses!

The motto of San Antonio toll road opponents is “Keep our FREEways free!” However, the term freeway doesn’t really mean that it’s free to drive on. Now admittedly my Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary has “a toll-free highway” as its second definition for freeway. But that use is purely colloquial and can lead to a lot of misunderstandings when talking about toll roads. Besides, if that was the true definition of a freeway, then the little residential street in front of most of our homes would be a “freeway”, and we all instinctively know that that’s just not the case.

In my last post, I discussed how toll roads came to be the funding option of choice in recent years for big road projects. The question I closed with was whether or not they’re the best solution, and if not, how to fund roadbuilding without them. As I alluded to, it’s really a chicken-and-egg scenario: do toll roads perpetuate the status quo, or does the status quo perpetuate toll roads?

My wife and I have had this conversation several times. She understands the problem, but is of the mind that tolls should be the option of absolute last resort—they need to fix the gas tax problems first. In essence, she thinks that the current toll paradigm is getting the cart before the horse.